Project description

sbo-selenium is a framework primarily intended to help write Selenium tests for
Django applications, although it may be useful in testing other kinds of web
applications as well.

Installation

Add ‘sbo-selenium’ to the requirements for the application being tested, and add
‘sbo_selenium’ to the INSTALLED_APPS setting. Install the new dependency as
usual for the containing project; for SBO packages this is typically:

pip install -r requirements/tests.txt

Make sure the post-merge runs to install all of the prerequisites:

./git-hooks/post-merge

Browser engines

If you are running tests using docker, you don’t need to worry about this part.

If you are not using docker, to run tests using a particular browser, the
browser driver needs to be present. To drive Chrome via Selenium, you’ll need
to install both Chrome itself and then chromedriver:

If you want to test in the iPad form factor, check the “Force Device”
checkbox and make sure “iPad” is selected next to it

Click the “Launch” button

To test Opera or Safari, you’ll need to download the Selenium standalone server
jar file
and configure the path to it in the SELENIUM_JAR_PATH setting
described below.

Note that all of these browsers and more can be tested using Sauce OnDemand;
see below for details.

Settings

sbo-selenium uses a few Django settings to configure some aspects of test
runs:

DJANGO_LIVE_TEST_SERVER_ADDRESS - The address at which to run the test
server (this will be used as the environment variable of the same name
described in the Django testing documentation). Default value is
'localhost:9090'.

SELENIUM_DEFAULT_BROWSER - The web browser to use for tests when none is
specified. Default value is 'chrome'.

SELENIUM_DEFAULT_TESTS - The Selenium test(s) to be run by default when
none are specified. Should be an array of test
specifications (see Running Tests below for examples). Default value is
an empty list.

SELENIUM_DOCKER_DEBUG - True if the debug version of the selenium Docker
container should be used (in order to allow VNC connections). Only relevant
when the --docker parameter is used. Default value is False.

SELENIUM_DOCKER_PORT - The port of localhost (or the Docker Machine, on
Mac and Windows) at which to expose the Selenium server running in a Docker
container. Only relevant when the --docker parameter is used. Default
value is 4444.

SELENIUM_DOCKER_TAG - The tag to use in identifying which version of the
Selenium Docker container to start. Only relevant when the --docker
parameter is used. Default value is 2.53.0.

SELENIUM_PAGE_LOAD_TIMEOUT - The number of seconds to wait for a response
to a GET request before considering it to have failed. Default value is 10
seconds. (This is particularly important when using Sauce Connect, as it
sometimes fails to connect properly, such that every single page load stalls
indefinitely.)

SELENIUM_POLL_FREQUENCY - The number of seconds to wait after a failed
operation before trying again. Default value is 0.5 seconds.

SELENIUM_SAUCE_API_KEY - The API key for the Sauce Labs account to use
for running tests.

SELENIUM_SAUCE_CONNECT_PATH - Absolute path of the
Sauce Connect binary, used when
testing a site that isn’t visible to the internet at large via Sauce Labs.
If not set but other parameters indicate Sauce usage, it’s assumed that the
site being tested is publicly accessible.

SELENIUM_SAUCE_USERNAME - The username for the Sauce Labs account to use
for running tests.

SELENIUM_SAUCE_VERSION - The version of Selenium to ask Sauce Labs to
use in the provided virtual machine. If omitted, the current default version
provided by Sauce Labs is used. Documentation on the available versions and
current default can be found here.

SELENIUM_SCREENSHOT_DIR - Absolute path of the directory in which to save
screenshots taken over the course of running tests (these can be useful for
debugging test failures). The directory will be created if it doesn’t
already exist. If the tests are being run via Sauce Labs, screenshots are
not created in this directory because that service generates screenshots for
us.

SELENIUM_TIMEOUT - The number of seconds to wait after an operation first
failed until giving up and declaring it an error. Default value is 10
seconds.

Note that some test runners (such as nose) may not always show errors logged
during test setup and teardown. To consistently get this output, you may want
to configure a logging handler that outputs to file (in addition to any that
may be outputting to console).

Creating Tests

We’re creating Selenium tests as Python classes. Typically you’ll want to
create a common subclass of sbo_selenium.SeleniumTestCase which each of your
application’s actual test classes will in turn inherit from. This main class
will contain methods for common operations like logging in and logging out,
verifying that common page content is present, loading typical test data, and
so forth. This can be defined in the application’s tests.selenium.__init__
module. Avoid method names with “test” in them, as the test runner is likely
to mistake them for actual standalone tests.

Each related set of tests should then be created as methods in a subclass of
this common test case class which lives in its own file within tests.selenium
(or a subdirectory thereof). These test methods should start with test_ so
the test runner can find them, and it’s generally good practice to have utility
methods which aren’t tests themselves start with an underscore. Typically each
test class will cover functionality on a single page or a set of closely
related pages.

Running Tests

Running Tests Locally

Tests can be run via the “selenium” management command:

./manage.py selenium --settings=myapp.selenium_settings

To run the default set of sbo-selenium tests:

./manage.py selenium

Or to specify which test(s) to run rather than using the defaults specified in
the settings file:

Having a separate settings file for the Selenium tests isn’t a requirement, but
in practice you’ll probably want to use different settings for the tests than
you do for development (for example, to make sure that DEBUG=False). If you
don’t want to type out the settings parameter each time, a simple shell script
should do the trick:

#!/bin/sh
./manage.py selenium $@ --settings=myapp.selenium_settings

All the usual methods that the test runner uses to identify tests should work:

(Note that a specifying a package, like myapp.tests.selenium when the actual
tests are defined in modules within that package, does NOT work.)

By default, tests are run in the browser specified by SELENIUM_DEFAULT_BROWSER.
You can use the -b or --browser parameter to change this:

./manage.py selenium -b firefox
./manage.py selenium --browser=safari

Valid browser names are “chrome”, “firefox”, “htmlunit”, “ios”, “opera”,
“phantomjs”, and “safari” (“ipad”, “iphone”, and “ipod” are treated as
synonyms for “ios”, the form factor is chosen in Appium).

If you want to specify a specific Selenium server to use as a command executor
(whether running on localhost, a specific remote server, a Docker container,
etc.), you can use the --command-executor parameter:

Note that if you are using a command executor in a Docker container, a remote
host, etc., you should not rely on localhost or 127.0.0.1 in
DJANGO_LIVE_TEST_SERVER_ADDRESS and must add the IP address which will be
used to access the server to ALLOWED_HOSTS. You can either specify the
real IP address (rarely ideal) or try to deduce it via code like the
following:

You can also specify the number of times to run the tests (for example, if you
have a test that is failing intermittently for some reason and want to run it
a few times to increase the odds of encountering the error):

./manage.py selenium -n 5

Running Tests in a Docker Container

As a convenience, you can use the --docker parameter to automatically start
a standalone Selenium server in a Docker container for chrome or firefox tests.
For this to work, the terminal must already be configured for docker
commands to work. The container will be stopped automatically at the end of
the test run. By default it uses the 2.53.0 image from
https://hub.docker.com/r/selenium/ and is exposed on port 4444, but this can
be customized via the Django settings described above.:

Note that if you’re running Docker containers in a virtual machine via
docker-machine or such and using tox, you’ll need to allow some
environment variables to be passed through to the tox environment by adding
the following to the appropriate environment in tox.ini:

passenv =
DOCKER_*
HOME

Running Tests at Sauce Labs

Instead of running tests in a local browser, they can be run on one in a
virtual machine hosted at Sauce Labs. Support
for this in sbo-selenium is designed to play nicely with the Jenkins
Sauce OnDemand plugin. For running tests in
Jenkins, just install that plugin and configure it for the job you want to
run. On a local machine, you’ll need to set the SELENIUM_SAUCE_* Django
settings described above and use a couple of command-line parameters in
addition to the -b browser name setting mentioned previously:

There’s also a --tunnel-identifier parameter which can be used to utilize
a named Sauce Connect tunnel; this is particularly useful if you intend to run
multiple Connect instances against the same account simultaneously (like on
multiple Jenkins slave nodes). For more about what these tunnels are and when
to use them, see the Sauce Labs documentation
on the topic.

Generating Documentation

Documentation for this package is generated using Sphinx
and some extensions for it from sbo-sphinx.
To generate the docs locally with any changes you may have made: